still, life (2010-11)
From the catalogue of the exhibition Still, Life, held jointly with Terry Kurgan, AOP Gallery, Johannesburg, 2011.
“Over the past few years, I have been scanning old family photographs – sometimes creased and scuffed, often ambered by time and light – in an attempt to constitute a digital archive. I’ve thought about such photographs as time capsules: amulets against oblivion and loss, their particular arrest holding a vanished moment.
As a profligate snapper of everyday life, I am also (nostalgically) intrigued by the time when a single photograph staunchly or tenderly memorialised an event.
Family members or friends marshalled to pose and smile in speckled sunlight; a still life of fruit casually resplendent upon a table; a dog long dead lending its quirky humour to the scene.
It is a commonplace that our individual recollections are both sustained and constructed by family photographs. The older photos, those that precede our personal historical time, join one another to constitute small clusters of collective memory (and collective amnesia); the more recent ones in which we ourselves appear wanly from another time, serve as mnemonics. These stills become prompts and then, more securely, ‘memories.’ The project Still, Life (2010-2011) consisted of some two hundred pencil drawings based on this family archive; the rendering is deadpan and almost illustrative, as there was no desire to mine these images for any interiority, and the installation was in impersonal and randomly arranged grids.”
The works comprising Still Life were block hung alongside a grid of prints of the verso side of the original photographs on which they were based, in the project Verso.
